World News Quick Take

Agencies

SOUTH AFRICA

Flood sets crocodiles free

About 15,000 crocodiles have escaped from a farm amid heavy rains and flooding, daily Beeld reported yesterday. The predators were sprung from the Rakwena Crocodile Farm in the far north of the country when owners were forced to open the gates to prevent a storm surge. Many have since been recaptured, but at least half remain on the loose, scattered far and wide. One turned up on a school rugby pitch 120km away. The surrounding Limpopo Province has been hit by serious floods which have killed 10 people and left many homeless.

NEW ZEALAND

South Pole rescue stalled

Bad weather forced rescuers in Antarctica to delay until today an attempt to reach a small plane that was carrying three Canadians when it disappeared over a mountain range. The plane was flying from a US station near the South Pole to an Italian research base in Terra Nova Bay. Its emergency locator started transmitting about 10pm on Wednesday in the Queen Alexandra Mountains, halfway to its intended destination. Authorities presume it crashed. Rescue crews yesterday spent about five hours circling above the site in a DC3 plane. However, heavy cloud and hurricane-force winds prevented them from seeing the plane or attempting a helicopter landing. The de Havilland Twin Otter plane was carrying survival equipment, New Zealand Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator John Ashby said. The plane is operated by Kenn Borek Air Ltd, a Canadian firm that charters aircraft to the US Antarctic program.

PHILIPPINES

Stuck US ship makes waves

The US Navy yesterday said it needed to remove thousands of liters of oil from a minesweeper stuck on the World Heritage-listed Tubbataha Reef, warning it was too badly damaged to be towed away. The 68m USS Guardian, which became embedded in the reef week ago, will have to be lifted onto another ship or barge, a process that might take another two weeks, US Rear Admiral Thomas Carney said. He said the Guardian had listed after being battered by huge waves, and the most pressing issue was to remove 57,000 liters of fuel. While Carney said it was too early to determine how much damage the ship has caused, the government reported this week that about 1,000m2 of coral had already been impacted. This equates out to roughly 1 percent of Tubbataha, famous for its rich marine life and coral that rival Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The incident has stoked public anger, with the US Navy yet to explain why it was sailing through a protected marine sanctuary en route to Indonesia. The head of the agency supervising the sanctuary said this week that the captain of the ship ignored warnings that it was nearing the reef.

VIETNAM

Execution drug to be made

The country will begin producing its own chemical for executing prisoners after factories in the EU stopped shipments because of objections there to the death penalty. The government stopped using firing squads in 2011 because of concerns it was traumatizing the shooters. Last year, it said it was unable to execute 532 on death row because it could not source the drugs for lethal injections. The Laborer newspaper yesterday quoted Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang as saying that the country would produce its own drug. Several US states have also said objections from EU factories were making it hard to find the chemical.